Talk:Braum/@comment-24054340-20140606155927/@comment-4068613-20140612093347
I don't think your opinion of "less freedom for better balance" is in the majority of players. *I'm not saying that makes you wrong, but it definitely makes it a bad idea to change the game for it. Having a game that plays "more fairly" but accomplishes it through blatant handicaps like only letting certain champions get the "(too?)good" items leaves the player feeling cheated. *Disabling certain items or even making new ones for different champions cheapens the experience. Like you lose against your opponent because they have access to better items for their role than they do. Or you can only ever play a champion in one role because no alternative itemization is available. *With your proposal in effect, you don't have choices. You have to conform to the meta in order to get anywhere. There's no way to break the mold or explore the game mechanics, because games are hard-wired to have every champion play in a predictable way. *It simplifies the game and devalues the player's ability to make choices, as well as being a balancing nightmare having to manually assign items to specific champions as metas shift and builds evolve. Taking meaningful choices away from the player is generally a bad idea, and doing it in such an overt and heavy-handed way feels bad as a player. *The system is much more fragile and requires much more tuning when you have to arbitrarily limit items to specific champions, as well as requiring absurd amounts of playtesting and data collection to determine how to make such assignments initially, every time a new champion is added, and every time and item or stat is retuned. *It's better to do a slow job of fixing game balance by tweaking here and there than it is to make your job "easier"(still contesting that) by insulting the player's autonomy. *There's a system in the game right now that partially adheres to your recommendation, and that's the items that have unique effects based on whether a champion is melee or ranged. This caveat irked me a little bit, but at least it feels natural in the sytem, and you can easily see the decision-making and merit of the limitation. Requiring the player to do this critical evaluation of (or simply feel duped by) such limitations on most or all items in the game feels bad. If you do have a (semi-)comprehensive overhaul of items and limitations, I strongly recommend a blog post, and I would gladly read it and further examine the benefits of your proposal, but right now you're exploring treacherous waters and trying to get others on-board without sufficiently easing the mind. A blog post that goes into more detail about your proposal would help us all to assess the matter more thoroughly. Sidenote: I think It's impossible to conclusively and convincingly determine "perfect balance" in a game like this under any plausible system, not only the current one. Limiting items might help, if done in certain ways, but I don't think it can possibly achieve "perfect balance", and I don't really see evidence that it's an effective way to get closer to a perfectly balanced game. TL;DR Removing player choice feels bad, I'm not sure that limiting items is easier or better than retuning champions and items, your willingness to surrender this freedom of itemization in the name of balance may not be shared by most players, and please make a blog post outlining your proposal.